Rozen Maiden, I applaud you. This series definitely has the best plot of the Summer Season series. In these three moments, this series really displayed that it was building up to something.

It’s great to see series that actually pay off. There are too many series that seem to be building up to stuff, only to not really do anything and go for a standard climax that just boils down to “defeat that bad guy” while doing drama things. Things like those are boring, and most often just pointless. Yeah, I guess that it’s all about the satisfaction of seeing an all-powerful being break down and all. But we’ve all been there. You need to spice things up.

I usually try to stay away from using other shows as examples, but ah. Screw it. I’m going to list some series that did this wrong (in my humble opinion, of course!). Slight spoilers may follow, but I’ll try to be as vague as possible.

K is a good example of a show that started off with promise, but didn’t do anything with it. And yeah, I know that it has a sequel coming, but that is no argument: I’ve said before that I don’t want to sit through an entire season if it’s just going to be build-up. It had all this build-up about these kinds… yet all of it didn’t really amount to anything: it was all very predictable, the characters took the most predictable turns in order to try and prevent things from going stale… not once did I feel like the creators were being really creative in where the plot was going.

Another area where this series could have gone wrong is in devolving into plain bad storytelling and devolving into plain stupidity. For that Tamako Market is a good example: you build up this nice and interesting family, who live in this interesting neighbourhood, only to completely derail the plot with that stupid prince subplot that never really went anywhere. And in the end, none of the build-up was really used.

Here, however. The first half of the series focused on the world of Jun who didn’t wind the key. It withheld a lot of characters. It put the entire cast of the show on a bus, save for Shinku and Suigintou, and focused on the intimate development between a very small set of characters. In these three episodes the characters went back to the other dimension, and it was glorious. Instead of one group of characters completely dominating the other, everything was balanced! Every character got his or her chance to shine and make impact!

A great example: in the second season of the original Rozen Maiden, Suigintou also made way for a different villain. However, here, her role as an anti-hero is SO MUCH BETTER. I love how she pretty much acknowledged that the reason why she held onto Suiseiseiki’s Rosa Mystica is pointless, and that she’s all doing it for “Father”. She’s neither good nor evil, she just has a huge price and doesn’t care about anything other than herself, and the creators haven’t overdone this by making her derail into either good or evil so far: she stayed true to herself, yet she also developed slightly, in the way that she stopped letting her pride get in the way of things that really don’t matter.

Also, Jun. I love what the creators did with him. For a while it was a bit weird how he created this new body for Kirakishou and all, but his development really put everything into place. The entire series is about people being trapped, trying to get out. In the past three episodes, a lot of characters actually succeeded in that. Jun did so by finally making decisions for himself. Going after his own feelings, rather than going with the flow. And the thing is: episode nine emphasized that his strongest bond is NOT necessarily with Shinku, the main doll of the series. Instead, Souseiseki is the doll HE made for himself. Not a replica or anything, it’s something he put together, outside of Shinku’s knowledge. The end of episode 11 remained vague about the outcome with the much hinted collapse of Shinku that could go either way here.

These episodes had so many things intertwine with each other, Really well done!Rating:6/8 (Awesome)

3 Responses

hey psgels. I’ve been reading your blogs recently and I enjoy your reviews, and this is my first time leaving a comment. I’m also following this series and find it quite interesting. What I found weird was why did this series divert so much from the previous rozen maiden? Where this series started was not following where the previous series ended off?

The Nomad version of Rozen Maiden (the first two anime seasons) diverged greatly from the manga source material. This is mostly due to the manga still being far from completed at the time. In Nomad, there’s a lot of character changes such as Suigintou being a bully and having an inferiority complex while manga Suigintou is very prideful and has a superiority complex. You can pretty much write off the entire second season and the OVAs as fanfiction.

Now the first series of the manga ended early with 8 volumes due to issues with their publishes. Then a second series started up that started us off in the not wound world.

Deen’s version is much more faithful to the manga version than Nomad was. The only thing Deen has done wrong so far is making the dolls smaller for some reason. The first episode of this season recapped the 8 manga volumes of the first manga series and the rest of the episodes are adapting the second manga series.

If you’ve never read the manga, I highly suggest reading the first series.

I agree, they did Suigintou great justice in this version. The interplay between the Doll’s was excellent too, on all levels. I still don’t get Kanaria, lol, kashira? Anyway, the whole bit in end with Kirakishou felt horrible in a way… and none of the characters (maidens or old Jun) seemed to be bothered at all… it just struck me as odd. I suppose perhaps I have too much sympathy for nonredeemable characters :)

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;(

(Sunday, Aug 2. 2015 09:47 PM)

@Masky: Are you talking about me?
Because if you are, you completely misread all I wrote…
But if that’s the case I don’t feel like explaining myself considering you probably don’t want to listen anyway…

Masky

(Sunday, Aug 2. 2015 02:09 PM)

Geez, people really make odd excuses when defending stuff they like ._.
…I feel like thats probably hypocritical comment coming from me since I’ve probably done that too, but I think I usually go with attitude of “Hey, you’d probably not like it anyway, but I think you are wrong about that thing” xD

Emma

(Saturday, Aug 1. 2015 09:47 PM)

@Aidan: I would recommend downloading it rather than browser-playing it as my browser kept crashing when I tried to.
Its quite short but it gives a great teaser and introduction to the game, that gets me excited for it.

Emma

(Saturday, Aug 1. 2015 09:45 PM)

@Aidan: Mangagamer have released the demo for kara no shoujo 2, they’ve also confirmed a release for Autumn. Its probably better to call this demo more of a prologue/compliment to the game with content exclusive to it.
Demo/prologue here: http://mangagamer.org/kns2/

AidanAK47

(Saturday, Aug 1. 2015 02:14 PM)

@invicableGod, Yep that comment was spam. Should have got rid of it first time I saw it.

Wicked

(Saturday, Aug 1. 2015 01:10 AM)

well, this place changed a lot. Gotta say, I’m not a fan of how they adapted GATE into an anime. It feels too decompressed. Manga did a better job at keeping the tension taut

;(

(Saturday, Aug 1. 2015 01:08 AM)

Also I am not the blog, I’m just a poster… I really hope you have enough sense to tell the difference…

;(

(Saturday, Aug 1. 2015 01:07 AM)

@Emo: you’re saying all that like that doesn’t fit your description to a T. Kinda sad actually…
Well I guess now at least I gave you one more thing to get angry about so your day seems just a bit more active than your last.

;(

(Saturday, Aug 1. 2015 01:03 AM)

I don’t think people are really expected to read it from the start anymore. I mean that’s probably why it stays popular in Japan considering people would have to be in their 20s at least to keep up from the start without reading hundreds of chapters just to keep up.

;(

(Saturday, Aug 1. 2015 01:00 AM)

Well admittly comics don’t seem to be that easy to follow (don’t actually read comics despite liking a lot of DC and marvel media), but anyway it’s not like the other long-running shounens in terms of continuity and more like the long-running comedies like say Kochikoma.

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